AI washing problem

There's a growing plague in the UK rental world, and it's not hidden fees or mystery service charges. It's the sudden obsession with sticking an "AI assistant" into every step of the application process.

You've probably seen it. You go to apply for a flat and instead of a normal form, you're met by a chirpy chatbot that asks for your house number… pauses for a small eternity… asks for your street… pauses again… then your town. By the time you reach the postcode, you're wondering if the tenancy will start before the chatbot finishes loading.

This is AI-washing. It's what happens when a company slaps "AI-powered" onto something that used to work perfectly well and, in the process, makes everything slower and clunkier.

The rental sector is a prime offender. Platforms like Goodlord have bolted chat interfaces onto old systems not because it improves the user journey, but because "AI-powered" sounds great in sales decks. The outcome? Tasks that used to take seconds — like address autocomplete — turn into long, drawn-out Q&As with an assistant pretending to "think" about whether "High Street" is a real place.

And let's be honest: there's no intelligence here. The bot isn't analysing anything or making smart decisions. It's just stretching one form field into a multi-step interrogation dressed up in tech buzzwords.

Here's the thing: great software doesn't need a spotlight. If you paste your address into a decent form, it should be parsed instantly — this isn't cutting-edge wizardry; we've had solutions for this since the 70s. If you upload a passport, OCR should grab the relevant details almost instantly — not make you sit through a dramatic "AI verification" sequence.

Real AI should operate quietly in the background doing the work that actually benefits from machine learning: detecting fraud, flagging anomalies, assessing risk, making affordability checks smarter. What we're getting instead are chatbots that keep asking if we're "still there" because they've somehow lost track of a form we filled in 20 seconds ago.

And this theatre comes with consequences. Tenants lose out on properties because the bot won't accept a perfectly normal UK flat number. Letting agents lose applicants who bail halfway through because the system keeps asking them to repeat basic details. Even worse, companies that genuinely use AI well get unfairly lumped in with the gimmicks.

The fix? Stop wasting people's time.

If the job can be done with straightforward code in seconds, do that. Use AI only where it genuinely moves the needle — speeding up document checks, improving risk modelling, spotting dodgy applications early. And if you are using AI behind the scenes, keep it quiet. No fake "thinking" animations. No three-minute postcode validations. No chats where a simple text field would do.

The best tech is invisible. AI-washing is the opposite: slow, noisy, and oddly proud of itself.

If we want renters, agents, and landlords to trust modern tools, we have to build software that actually helps — without the drama. This is why we built BeRentalReady.